I was born in Corvalis, Oregon March 14, 1941. Most of my chilhood years were spent in Klamath Falls, Oregon, which I consider my "hometown". I did my undergraduate work at the University of Oregon, where I got a degree in French, but I did not discover Linguistics until I entered the graduate program in French at Northwestern University. I had no talent or passion for studying literature, but I had always been interested in language structure (I was the kid who actually like sentence diagramming in high school English), so after completing an MA in French, I attended UC Berkeley for one year of graduate work in Linguistics.
By this time, I had spent my entire sentient life as a student, so to broaden my experience, I entered the Peace Corps, where I was a volunteer for two years in Niger Republic. Since this was a francophone country, it gave me a chance to use the French that I had learned. I worked in adult literacy, so I was also able to apply my linguistics through work on both the Hausa and Tamazhaq languages. Following the Peace Corps I came to UCLA where I completed the PhD in Linguistics, which included a year of field work in northern Nigeria on a Chadic language called Ngizim. In the mid 70's, I spent two years again in northern Nigeria as a researcher in the Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages, working on a number of languages.
I was hired as a tenure track faculty member at UCLA in 1975, where I remained with the exception of one year as a Visiting Professor, teaching Hausa and linguistics at Ahmadu Bello University, Nigeria (1982-83). I have also made numerous shorter trips to Africa. These included two summers as Director of the Education Abroad Program in Togo and other trips to Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, and Ghana for field work and/or to attend conferences. I was Chair of the UCLA Linguistics Department for five years, 1989-94.
Since 2000, I have returned to my Nigerian research roots in Potiskum, Nigeria, supported by three grants from the National Science Foundation. I have been working on six languages of the Chadic family spoken in Yobe State in northeastern Nigeria in collaboration with my former UCLA PhD student, Alhaji Maina Gimba.
I am married and have two daughters. My extra curricular interests include long distance running and music. In the mid-1990's, I picked up the clarinet, after a hiatus lasting basically since my undergraduate student days, and play in a Balkan music ensemble. I have had a long interest in music, which in recent years I have combined with linguistics in the study of text setting of African poetry to musical performance.